Hornet Educational Learning Portal/Concordia College Alabama

On-line Procedures

This is a collection of procedures that should be followed by Concordia
College students, faculty and staff to provide a productive learning
experience in on-line and web enabled courses at Concordia College
Alabama.

IT infrastructure

The college currently provides
for the information technology needs of the campus in Selma. Students,
faculty, and staff are provided with email accounts and access to
educational records on servers that are located on the campus in Selma.
The servers are accessible are on campus through the campus Ethernet and
wireless network. Servers are also accessible off campus through the
campus Internet connection which has limited band width. Off campus
students would be better served by servers that were collocated off
campus.

For the college to expand its on-line program it will
be necessary to budget for providing services. The Internet connection
for the campus needs to be increased to provide for better access of
residential students to off site resources on the Internet (improved
bandwidth). In order to provide better services for off campus students,
provision should be made for providing services from an off campus location.

The
campus houses several physical servers in the IT room in Wright
Complex. Most of these servers support multiple applications using
visualization. The current servers are operating at capacity and it
would be helpful to have more resources to use. The servers are also
subject to power outages. The current backup power is not working
adequately. Disk space and memory are short. Much of the hardware is ageing. Additional hardware both on and off campus need to be added in the near future.

Current email is also self hosted in the
Wright Complex. IT staff issues students accounts and changes passwords
for them. This serves as verification of student identity. Students in a
fully on-line program may not be able to come to campus for these
services. There needs to be a method to change password and verify
identity.

The learning
management system is currently self hosted. Increasing students and
courses will place more load on the server and will require more disk
space. to accommodate substantially more students and extensive video
conferencing. The current network and servers and designed to serve the campus community. Students in on-line courses may be better served by
hosting the system or parts of the system off site.

The current
system is based on Moodle, but includes several integrations for
additional features. Turnitin is used to address plagiarism. Mahara provides integrated portfolios and BigBlueButton is available for web
conferencing. If other features are needed by future programs, they can be added if demand is sufficient by the program.